Techno Terror McSweeny’s is full of English goodness. “When A Stranger Emails” makes for a nice “ruin-the-story-with-technology” project. So many stories/movies/poems could be ruined by technology. For instance, take W.C. Williams’ This Is Just To Say – I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold Replace it with – Created with Fakeiphonetext.com. Words Matter – Calling All Chubbies There is plenty more proof that word choice matters over at Retronaut. Shorpy’s If you’re a history teacher, you probably want to check out the beautiful images from Shorpy.com. Here’s the larger original. It would actually make for a pretty good writing prompt as well. And even more randomly 7 people who hated Pride and Prejudice – help your students realize they aren’t alone. Analyze the critiques. Write your own. Write critiques of other books by other authors. Colder than absolute zero “Oddly, another way to look at these negative temperatures is to consider them hotter than infinity, researchers added.” – That’s pretty close to either Monty Python or poetry. And in an attempt to deal with my lack of patience I plan to either tattoo TTT on my arm or at least put up a poster. Since it’s a Scandanavian grook […]

In the first message, I have my ten year old son asking if I’ve created his WordPress blog yet. For the record, I did and told him in person- although the reminder was needed. The second message is an image from Alan’s Flickr stream who he has met and now follows on Flickr. He “favd” the image. The third message is a link to the image below. We’d had a brief discussion the other day because my eight year old was really unhappy that he has learned about metamorphosis multiple times in school. I asked if he knew that caterpillars essentially turned to soup in the chrysalis. He did not but was pleased to learn that little fact. I got the chrysalis image a day or two later and was able to respond with a link to an article on the whole caterpillar soup thing. This is just one of those little things that interweaves and extends our normal lives in ways I find interesting and meaningful. It’s an interweaving and extension of our conversations. It’s easy to overlook how interesting this is.